Roughly 75% of the the critics are supportive of John Dahl‘s You Kill Me, the dark and somewhat skewed Ben Kingsley- Tea Leoni comedy about a Buffalo-based hitman trying to recover from alcoholism during an attempted dry-out in San Francisco. I mean, 75-25 is a pretty good RT average.

Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni

That’s more or less how I feel myself, having found it mostly likable, amusing, agreeable…but with a few undeniable speed-bumps. And yet Kingsley is one of our absolute best — he seems incapable of delivering a line or an emotion that doesn’t have some kind of unexpected edge or inflection or flavoring — and the film itself is a nicely sardonic, above-average adult dramedy, which is enough to warrant a pass.
And yet I’ve had trouble trying to write something about it the last week or so. And there’s always a reason for the foot-dragging syndrome. In this case “reasons,” which I’ll get into shortly. But being the son of an alcoholic and a veteran of more than a few Al-Anon meetings over the past few months (and during a period in the mid ’80s), I feel a certain kinship with You Kill Me.
So to pay it the proper respect, I finally got off my ass and arranged (with the much-appreciated assistance of publicist Karen Oberman) to do a phoner with director John Dahl, and here it is.
I said after seeing You Kill Me that I’m feeling “hit-manned out” — tired of character studies of personable, regular-joe, emotionally vulnerable professional assassins in mainstream movies. There’s no recognizable metaphor in making a film about a hitman — it’s just a stock, post-Tarantino convention that conveys a generic dark- thrill factor. I think it’s lazy to go there at this point in time.

John Dahl

The sympathetic portraits of gangland assassins by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction was, I think, the first in this vein. Three years later John Cusack played a broadly comedic GenX hitman in Grosse Point Blank. I’d begun to tire of the idea by the time Richard Shepard‘s The Matador — a dark comedy about a burnt-out hitman (Pierce Brosnan) who beriends a middle-class married guy (Gregg Kinnear) — came along. So it was hard for me to absorb You Kill Me with any kind of fresh, open-to-new-things attitude.
Plus I didn’t believe that Tea Leoni‘s youngish-looking character (Leoni is 41 but looks 35) would fall for Kingsley’s with Kingsley himself being 63 and pretty much looking it, and also being an alcoholic assassin. I wanted to buy it, but I couldn’t. I could see it happening if Kingsley looked ten years younger and had lied to Leoni about the seriousness of his drinking problem and what he does for a living… maybe. But no relatively sane woman would be so self-destructive as to hook up with a guy like Kingsley’s soused hitman…no way.
Plus I found it silly that Kingsley’s character would admit his profession to his Alcoholics Anonymnous group on the presumption that no one would tell anyone else about it because of the AA confidentiality thing.
But I worship Kingsley the actor and I can’t help but warm to stories about healing (my all-time favorite being Tender Mercies), and so here I am banging this out at 8:58 ayem, knowing I have to get out of here and down to the Apple store at the Grove so I can take a picture or a video of the I-Phone customers lined up outside.

I meant to run Thursday’s tracking summaries yesterday, but nothing had changed very much since my last report so I kind of lost interest. Ratatouille is assured of a commanding #1 status (never in question), but it’s probably going to end up with a Sunday-night total of $50 million, give or take. In some quarters that will be seen as underperforming by Pixar standards. I was estimating Live Free or Die Hard to earn a weekend figure in the mid 20s and the high 30s for the five days. Sicko will do pretty well ($10 million, perhaps a touch higher), but it will also finally begin to generate the word-of-mouth (i.e., it’s selectively but fundamentally true and very touching at the end) that should keep it rolling for a good while.

Bolted out of a 10 pm screening of Transformers after toughing it out for 90 minutes, and stopped by the hallowed Bronson gate on the way out — Thursday, 6.28.07, 11:35 pm; Landmark ticket kiosk — Thursday, 6.28.07, 7:25 pm

Zen-Minded Journalist: “Because putting your life in danger is actual living. The rest is television.”

This is a line heard at the end of the trailer for Richard Shepard‘s The Hunting Party (Weinstein Co., 8.17), a thoughtful actioner previously known as Spring Break in Bosnia.
It’s basically about three guys — a TV journalist on the downswirl (Richard Gere), his smart-ass camera operator (Terrence Howard) and an upstart journalist whippersnapper (Jessie Eisenberg) — who embark on an impulsive, what-the-hell? mission to find the no. 1 war criminal in Bosnia. Naturally, complications ensue.
An HE reader who worked on the shooting and cutting of the film says he’s “extremely proud of this movie” and that “in this insane marketplace of sequels and sequels-to-sequels, an original non-cookie cutter movie needs all the love and attention it can get.” True enough….no, obviously true.

“And now here is Heather Graham, who demurs when you ask her age even though simple math shows it to be 37, shivering in a too-cold hotel suite wearing a borrowed dress that shows her arm flab and Versace shoes that pinch her feet, and she’s promoting an inert little movie called Gray Matters that will perform so poorly in the U.S. it won’t even be seen in Canada until the end of June, and then only in a straight-to-video release.” — from a Toronto Globe and Mail profile by Simon Houpt.

Arm flab? The disdain and outright cruelty contained in this graph is pretty stark. I’ve written snippy or unkind things about this or that performer, but I would never make it this mean. Houpt is a good writer, but where am I getting the feeling he may be dealing with with yin-yang feelings? (Wants to biblically “know” Graham, knows he can’t, decides to trash her.) She’s been on the ropes for some time now and…well, it’s a tough road out there. For a lot of us. I don’t see the point (or gain) in rubbing in the salt.

Richard Kelly has finally moved on from the somewhat disastrous Southland Tales chapter in his career by launching a new movie, The Box, a PG-13 horror film based on a Richard Matheson short story that became a Twilight Zone episode.
Kelly has written the screenplay. (An earlier report mentioned his having co-written it with Eli Roth). The $30 million flick, bankrolled by Media Rights Capital, will start shooting in the fall. Cameron Diaz will star as a thirty-ish wife with a greedy, opportunistic streak. (No word on the guy playing her husband.)
A site called Upcoming Horror Movies, linking to an early May report on Sci Fi Wire, quotes Kelly about the origins and plot particulars: The Box “is about a mysterious box that arrives on a young couple’s doorstep,” he says.. “There’s a button on the box that presents them with an offer that says they will receive a great financial reward if they push the button, but someone they know will die. Madness ensues, and that’s what the rest of the story’s about.”
“It’s kind of a cult story that Matheson wrote long ago that was later formed into a Twilight Zone episode that I’d fallen in love with as a kid. Once I arrived in the business and had the opportunity to option the material, I thought it would be a great film, and Eli [Roth] and I found a lead into the material. It should be a good movie. We’ll see.”
I can’t figure which Twilight Zone episode Kelly is referring to. Here‘s a list of the episodes written by Matheson, and I don’t see anything that seems to fit the description. It may be based on a segment in the mid ’80s Twilight Zone revival series called “Button, Button.”
A synopsis that may or may not be reliable: “A down-on-their luck couple is given a box with a button on it, and told if they push it they’ll recieve $200,000, but also that pushing the button will kill someone they don’t know. The wife finally pushes it against her husband’s will. The guy who delivers the box in the first place shows up with the money and to also retrieve the box to reset it. To the couple’s surprise the guy assures them that the button will be reset and given to someone they don’t know.”

You have to wade through six paragraphs of stalling before getting to the meat of Leo Lewis‘s first-anywhere-review of Harry Potter and The Order of The Pheonix (Warner Bros,., 7.11) in the London Times, but he finally gets around to calling it “a solid, occasionally spectacular set-piece that struggles unsuccessfully to give us thrills and fun we have not already had in previous installments.”
In short, it’s another big lumbering under-achieving tentpoler in a summer season that has seen two or three of these before…shocker!
Lewis also notes that Pheonix “is far crueler than its predecessors and begins to introduce properly the idea that we are no longer in an amusing magical playground, but are en route to an epic confrontation with real victims. But overall there is a shortage of those joyful little glimpses of the wizarding world’s furniture that punctuated and perked up the previous films. The fifth — and longest — book on which the film is based plays a crucial but faintly turgid role in the saga.”

It’s nearly time to get out the notepad and start making a list of seemingly ambitious, seemingly high-pedigree dramas coming out in late September, October or early November that won’t be showing at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (or Venice or Telluride). The bizarre case of The Departed aside, it always means something when a low- or mid-budgeted fall drama ducks out of these three festivals. This was reflected in an article I wrote last fall about Running With Scissors called “The Old Toronto Sidestep.” Ditto a piece about the festival-avoiding History Boys called “Art of the Dodge.”

It’s not being announced on the El Rey theatre’s website, but Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova will perform at that Wilshire Blvd. venue on Wednesday, August 1st. They’ll also perform at an invite-only industry event at West L.A.’s Landmark on 7.31, and tape appearances with Craig Ferguson, Carson Daly and Jay Leno.

Here’s the trailer for David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises (Focus Features, 9.14), which will apparently play at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. The trailer tells you it’s a Cronenberg fim, all right. Steely, ominous undercurrents running every which way. Focus Features is presumably screening it for long-leaders; I guess they’ll get around to guys like me down the road.Viggo Mortensen is Nikolai (i.e., “Nee-koh-lie”), a London mobster who gets into a head-turning, challenged- values situation when he crosses paths with Naomi Watts‘ Anna, an “innocent midwife” trying to “right a wrong”, etc. The costars are Armin Muehler Stahl and Vincent Cassell (playing a frenzied psycho for the 29th time…he needs to play a concerned straight-laced dad in a family film)A History of Violence reminded everyone that Cronenberg excels at realistic dramas about moral conflicts. Forget the spiders and the surrealism — Cronenberg operates best in the clear light of day with ordinary but slightly twisted flesh-and- blood mortals. (Crash, one of my all-time favorite Cronies, was more or less in this vein. Ditto The Dead Zone.) It’s his surrealist-fantasy stuff — ironically the genre that put him on the map back in the ’70s — that has begun to gradually diminish in estimation.
This is not to discredit Scanners, Dead Ringers,The Fly, Naked Lunch, Videodrome and all the others in this vein. I’m just saying Cronenberg is “better” — his films feel more profound and penetrating in a straight-up, less labored way — when he’s not working with visual metaphors.

“The movie portrays nearly all of Christian Bale‘s Laotian captors and their North Vietnamese allies as subhuman, barely-civilized sadists who live to inflict torture and physical abuse. The paranoia and gaunt frames of the Americans (Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies) attest to their brutal treatment, which is no doubt based on reality. Nevertheless, sitting through Rescue Dawn is like watching a war movie made by the Ku Klux Klan.
“Not that I’m surprised by this approach, because the history of movies about the Vietnam War is mostly a history of forgetting: forgetting that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation; forgetting they were real people; forgetting they had a rich, thousand-year old civilization and had been struggling to overthrow their colonial masters — first the French, then the Americans — for decades.
“For the most part, Vietnam War movies are all about us — the Stars and Stripes — and the ways the war messed with our heads. Thanks to our immersion into the heart of Southeast Asian darkness, we learned the Nature of True Evil, which compelled and even required us to kill everything that moved.
“Rescue Dawnrevels in dehumanization. And it doesn’t just demonize the locals; it conveniently leaves out some essential historical context. For starters, Laos was a neutral country being used by various powers as a proxy in a secret war, a sideshow to the bigger conflict in Vietnam proper. U.S. forces flew an estimated 600,000 secret bombing raids into the country between 1964 and 1973.
“The idea that the Laotians are just a teeny bit pissed at our boy Dieter and his counterparts is [therefore] understandable: They’ve been napalming their fields, slowly starving them to death. I’m not defending their treatment of the prisoners, but the film tends to shuck off this information as if it didn’t exist. The slow-motion bombing montage that opens the film stands apart from the narrative that follows; Herzog never connects the desperate situation of the locals — more than 350,000 of whom perished during the bombing campaign — with the depraved acts of their captives.
“Last year Letters From Iwo Jima set out to humanize the Japanese soldiers who fought during World War II, doing so with compassion and realism. Yet 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, our enemies, whose crimes pale in comparison to the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities committed by the Japanese, are still portrayed as savages of the first order.
“Is there some kind of half-century moratorium before you can acknowledge your opponents as human beings? Even Sen. John McCain, a POW who famously endured six years of imprisonment and torture, has returned to Vietnam and reconciled with his former enemies. Of course, ‘German’ movies were coming out barely a decade after World War II (see Marlon Brando as a sensitive Nazi in 1958’s The Young Lions), but let’s not even go there — that’s an entire graduate course on racial politics.
Rescue Dawn “is a well-made, compelling film, but I have yet to read a review that mentions anything about its racial and historical context. Are critics just giving its world-class director a pass? Maybe they’ve been so caught up in the story, they’ve forgotten to explore its context? Perhaps they simply accept these crazed Asian stereotypes as givens and don’t even notice them anymore (I’d love to hear what some Asian-film aficionados think of this picture)?”

This is not a preemptive expression of disrespect, but yesterday’s announcement about Ryan Gosling being cast in Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones produced an involuntary twitching sensation. (Not a literal twitch of the neck or facial muscles, but a faint internal shuddering by way of a psychological spasm.) Both of these guys are renowned for making sure that the movies they make/create are always about them before anyone or anything else, which suggests that a huge battle of the egos will commence when filming begins.
Jackson will insist on turning Alice Sebold‘s best-selling novel into a movie about his miraculous directorial eye and relentless visual energy first, and the celestial story of the murdered Susie Salmon second. Gosling, in turn, will come on set and do all he can to make his character of Jack, Susie’s dad, about the endlessly fascinating currents raging within his own person (as opposed to those within Jack), and that’s a recipe for a movie at cross purposes.
Each and every Gosling performance (including the one in Half Nelson) is about his peculiar internal-ness, which is always about Gosling’s insistence on delivering a “Ryan Gosling performance” — a lot of chuckling to himself, those frosty-blue beady little eyes doing the old hard-stare, internal-shock thing, the nerd wardrobe and the nerd haircuts, tucking himself into emotional fetal balls, that little half-twitter of a laugh.
As I said two or three weeks ago, there’s no stopping (i.e., containing) Peter Jackson now. He’s where Federico Fellini was in the early ’70s, which is to say totally unbound and unable to make any film that isn’t exclusively about the wonderful (and extremely profitable, let’s not forget!) world of his own psychology and imaginings. Whenever he comes to mind I think of Ray Harryhausen‘s “Kraken” in Clash of the Titans.